In the late spring of 1983, Lou Specker loaded an oil painting into his hatchback and dashed off to the Cincinnati Zoo.

What he didn't know as he ferried the canvas across town that morning, 33 years ago, was that the image he'd just finished – more than a dozen baby zoo animals, gazing intently at the artwork's viewer, the night sky behind them – would become something of a local icon.

To be sure, “iconic” isn’t a word to be thrown around lightly. But the image, which became the zoo's “New Ones” poster, seems to fit the bill. Many Cincinnati kids of the '80s – and their parents – will remember the creatures' steady stare from visits to local pediatricians' or dentists' offices. Those were among the natural habitats of the statement-making-sized poster, which sold by the thousands at the zoo and local frame shops.

“The poster sort of took on legs and became a thing of legend,” said zoo director Thane Maynard, who has been with the Cincinnati Zoo for 39 years. “The darn things are 30-something years old, and you still see them in people’s homes and veterinarian’s offices.” (Maynard is no exception: He has one hanging in his home.)

And although the zoo has printed a number of posters since then, all of the others put together “never sold a 10th" of what that original poster did, Maynard said.

But that could change soon, thanks to the zoo's newest poster.

"Zoo Babies" is a reimagining of that iconic one, created in the stylized realism of nationally known children's author and illustrator Loren Long.

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Loren Long holds the "Zoo Babies" painting that was used to create a new poster for the Cincinnati Zoo. The work is acrylic on a birch panel. He is pictured in his studio in Madeira.(Photo: The Enquirer/Patrick Reddy)

Getting to 'Zoo Babies'

The original “New Ones” poster, it seems, was so well known that people kept asking for it long after it went out of print.

Marianne Sandhage guesses that happened at least 10 years ago. The owner of Frame & Save Hyde Park, which she founded in 1985, Sandhage sold hundreds of copies – and kept one for herself, though she had to move it to a back room so she wouldn’t have to disappoint the customers who kept asking for it.

Yet even without the reminder of its physical presence, customers kept asking, at least a dozen times per year.

She and her husband, Doug, finally decided to do something about it. They approached the zoo. Turned out, even more people were asking for the poster there.

The zoo wanted to reprint it. But neither they nor the zoo staffers they approached knew how to find Specker or the original. And it was created long before today's easily archived digital files.

With the goal of creating a new version, the Sandhages reached out to a local illustrator that they – and thousands of children’s book buyers – already knew.

Long, 51, is approached for a lot of projects. That's not surprising: The author/illustrator of the Otis series (centered around the adventures of a tractor, with a million copies in print) and the illustrator of President Barack Obama’s picture book "Of Thee I Sing" is no stranger to the New York Times bestsellers' list.

But this project was special. A “no-brainer.”

"The zoo of my life is the Cincinnati Zoo," he said.

Long has lived in Cincinnati his entire adult life, having moved here to work for Gibson Greetings after he finished school. But even before that, as the closest zoo to his childhood home in Lexington, "the Cincinnati Zoo always felt like home," he said.

The artist has always been an animal lover. Two Weimaraners, Moon and Elle, pad behind him and he enters and exits his light-filled studio. The right leg of his gray jeans – almost the same color as the dogs – is covered with streaks of paint. That's where he wipes his round-tipped brushes – a much more fluid motion than using a paper towel – while he's working. Spread across his drawing desk are sketches for a Margaret Wise Brown (of "Goodnight Moon" fame) project that he's working on for HarperCollins.

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Artist Loren Long's Weimaraners, Moon (left) and Elle, rest on the floor of his studio near a copy of the "Zoo Babies" poster he created. He had some of the posters, created for the Cincinnati Zoo, in his Madeira studio to sign.(Photo: The Enquirer/Patrick Reddy)

Surrounded by windows on three sides, the studio is perched like a dream of a treehouse atop his Madeira home. The home itself is surrounded by woods, so bird and animal sightings are common. His wife, Tracy, scatters grain for the deer.

And Long grew up drawing animals – horses, in particular. He distinctly remembers a painting he made of Secretariat, based on a photo that his family took when they went to see the racehorse, when he was in the seventh grade.

Reimagining an icon

Creating a fresh take on an icon is intimidating, even for a successful artist like Long. After all, he, too, knew the original poster. It hung in his sons' pediatrician's office in Mason.

"Anytime, as an artist, you're in an arena where something's always been successful, it's like replacing Johnny Carson or pinch-hitting for Babe Ruth," he said.

As it happens, he has some experience in that arena. In 2005, Penguin asked him to create new art for the children's classic "The Little Engine That Could." A tall order, considering the popularity of the beloved book: Today, there are more than 15 million copies in print. (Approximately 535,000 of those are Long's re-illustrated edition.)

"At the end of the day, you have to put all that aside and say, 'I'm the one creating this,'" he said. "I'm going to give it 110 percent, I'm going to put my blood, sweat and tears into it. I can't worry about what came before."

So in recreating the zoo poster, he made a few changes. Gave the new one his own stamp.

In Long's version, the night sky is gone, replaced with a bright blue one. In comparison to its predecessor, the colors are brighter overall; the creatures, even more distinctly juvenile.

And hidden within the image is a likeness of Otis the tractor. (Hint: It's extremely subtle.)

The creatures depicted aren't the exact same animals – though some, such as the elephant, appear in both. Long had some guidance from the zoo about which animals to include. And he had to add his favorite: The polar bear.

Some were chosen, frankly, just for their adorableness. He picked the baby rhino over the baby hippo because they have a similar look, but a baby rhino, though still hornless, has shapes where its horns will eventually grow.

For the month of February, he put his publishing schedule aside and painted the poster art, acrylic on birch panel. (He's always working on a book. He puts out one a year, each consisting of 20 to 25 paintings.) Working with photographs from the zoo's archives, he set out to capture each of the 16 animals, plus three insects, in a realistic way. (Though he took some liberties with space relativism. The potto is just a little too big, in relation to its brethren, to be a baby, for example.) And to make them loveable.

"You're not just trying to get the likeness of the animal; you're trying to get to the soul," he said.

That's where the eyes come in.

"If you look into the eyes of these animals, there's a certain appealing, positive innocence ... You start to get to the essence of the being of that character.

"You look into the eyes of this baby polar bear and he's just saying, 'come and see me,'" he said. "That sweetness is what I was going for."

The original "New Ones" poster, by Lou Specker.(Photo: Provided)

Why the original endured

Part of the appeal of both posters, of course, is the fact that the animals depicted are babies.

“We literally are born to think that baby mammals are super cute," Maynard said. "That’s why we go to the trouble of raising them.”

And the unusually large size, 27 inches by 47 inches, helps make the image memorable. (The new version has the same dimensions.)

It also helped that for the zoo, the poster wasn't just a poster. It was created during what Maynard describes as a surge in marketing, as well as in visitors, at the zoo.

After all, it was around that time that the zoo was launching what are now well-known programs – and a marketing department to really promote them. PNC Festival of Lights got its start that year. Zoofari debuted the year before. Zoo Babies would launch two years later. Like the iconic image, that trend has endured: Just in the past decade, zoo attendance has grown from 1 million per year to 1.6 million per year, Maynard said.

That ties into another possible reason for the original's longevity: Local love, particularly for an institution that was quickly ingraining itself in the lives of Cincinnati residents.

“There’s a huge sense of pride in all things Cincinnati," Sandhage said. "That was the face of the Cincinnati Zoo."

And then there's that just that indescribable quality that makes some art resonate on a wide scale.

This one had it.

Past meets present

Many of Long's words are echoes of Specker's. Reached by phone at his White Oak home, Specker, now 65, recalled creating the artwork for the original poster. Five feet by four feet, oil on canvas. It was around Memorial Day 1983. He had only about a week to complete it.

"I ate, slept and drank it that week," he said of the painting.

But that's not unusual for him. Just as Long did, he described his work as a labor of love.

And just like Long, Specker was a lifelong animal lover. He had, by his account, “every animal in this area that was wild down in the basement” of his White Oak home. Raccoons, geckos, turtles, snakes. The possums, he recalled, were particularly smart, letting themselves out of their cages at night, eating the chameleons and shutting themselves back in.

Needless to say, he was excited about working on the zoo poster.

"When this job came up, I was chomping at the bit," he said. "This is the kind of job that I lived for."

Dan Bittman hired Specker to work on the project with Bittman's then-company, Design Team One. The poster's mission was to raise awareness about the zoo's breeding success, Bittman said.

The two decided on a realistic style for the animals and worked out the concept together.

"The animals are set up as if a photographer put them together and got them to behave for one second and look at the camera," Specker said. (After that, he imagines, it would have been bedlam.)

Specker said he wanted to depict the creatures in ways he’d never seen them depicted. So he gave them eyelashes. And a gleam in their eyes that humans would never experience with wild animals.

"I wanted to get the intimacy that you would get with your own pet," he said. "It's all about the eyes – that's the soul. I want to know the whole animal, and there's no better way to know an animal than the eyes."

Artists never finish a piece, he muses. They abandon it when they think little changes won't make it better, or that they might make it worse. Or they have a deadline.

With his "New Ones" poster, it was the deadline. He'd tinkered with the painting so long that he didn't even take the time to sign it. He'd been up all night.

"I didn't have children," he said. "Every illustration, every piece of artwork I'd ever done, was like my child."

This particular child went out into the world and became a success.

"Everybody loved it," he said. Himself included.

"I had my marks that I was trying to achieve," he said. "No other project that I had since then has hit all of the marks 100 percent. It achieved all its goals and was recognized for it."

In the intervening years, he has gotten calls from people from around the country. For a while, he'd send them a copy. Now, he has so few that he wants to hold onto them. He still has the original in his home.

A new poster for a new era

No one sees the new poster as a replacement for the old one. But those involved in its creation hope it brings back a good memory.

And they hope it will help the zoo. Long donated his time to create the image. "In some small way, a guy like me can contribute to the zoo in a way that I never would have been able to before," he said.

The Sandhages paid for the printing of 5,000 posters, 4,500 of which they've donated to the zoo. (The rest they'll sell in their shop.) Proceeds from the zoo's poster sales will be used for the care and feeding of its animals.

For his part, Long knows some people will like the old one better. And that's OK. Some will prefer his version.

Specker likes that Long was the artist chosen to create a new version. "His images compel," he said. "He's an artist's artist."

"I think he captured the essence of the old one without copying it," Sandhage said of Long's creation. "I think it’s a beautiful piece of art. We’re hoping it becomes an iconic piece of art just like the old one."

Maynard, who admires Long’s reimaging – the “cute” look in each animal’s eyes, and the humanlike way they’re facing the viewer – thinks it will.

“I’m confident that it will actually take on a bigger life, only because the zoo has darn near twice as many visitors today and members today, and a bigger profile of all of the things that we do," he said. “I think we have another winner on this one."